Mortal Human

GTA San Andreas is the best game for modding, hands down. The reasons are many, but first I will talk a little bit about other game engines. Maybe you are coming over from Unreal Tournament or Source games – this is a whole different world from those!

Let’s take Unreal III for the first example; When you mod that, unless you do some really extensive stuff, the only thing you’re going to be able to do is create arena maps and have death matches in them. The beauty of game modding to me is what the game offers to would-be indies or industry hopeful.

Maybe you find the tools supplied a little crunchy and proprietary. Indeed, it is because their tool sets are crunchy and proprietary. Rockstar Games’ GTA3 series engine for San Andreas offers game modders so much pre-existing content that creating a whole new game with others who own San Andreas on the PC ($2.64 !) only really requires some world modeling and a couple of scripters, with the original offering of the game further complimented and  expanded by script hooks and a library extension named Cleo.

San Andreas had an unused MPACK feature which allows modders to create “episodes” rather easily if they possess game scripting know how or are already on the road to learning it. You want to make maps? You just need Gmax (or 3DS Max prior to 2010 if you’re a pro) and the basic gta max scripts written long ago by Kam, wherever he is, thank you.

That leads me to a problem, however. It is all totally community generated. The key to success in learning this engine will be to engage in the gta modding community and if you’re really passionate about this stuff, you can try out their IRC channels, too. There are a lot of people on there all the time.

Since everything you can do with this engine is third party, the very existence of a ‘GTA Modding’ pretty much lands in the hands of the community that plays in the engine. That says a lot about the actual usability of the engine. Rockstar knew what they were doing when they made this engine. It has spoiled me when it comes to fun time.

The utmost irony is that since it is modding, you can only use it to reach the people who are playing it, and playing it on the pc, and are looking for mods for it – a pretty small slice of the gaming pie? Nah, everyone has San Andreas. The best game engine for modding is also only moddable through the efforts of the people who love the series is also an irony that says a lot about what the alternatives fail in – knowing how to make tools the way modders would make tools.

I’m just rambling on at this point. I don’t have much to say today and I just wanted anyone who is looking for the best game engine for modding who knows the benefits that games modding can have for their somewhat related efforts elsewhere to know about the GTA San Andreas engine. It really is capable of a lot more than what the PS2 pretty much “limited” it to as a later porting to the PC. ENB series screenshots should show some third party examples there, and if you are smart with your collision, you can make much higher polygon geometry in this game than what we saw in 2004 playing it.

In basic terms, since this engine is so easy to get your models into and drive around and shoot things in, if I was ever going to make a mod, it would probably be on the San Andreas engine. It is pretty lacking on the side of an active tool development community, but what has been developed by those guys so long ago is still relatively active with new mods popping up often. There is just no engine better for ‘the small-mod-team’ than GTA San Andreas.

Not even GTA IV is a realistic platform for modding unless some truly viable tool chain for it is finally developed. Rockstar will probably never release tools for GTA, so without an active community, modding lives and dies with San Andreas as far as I’m concerned – an old engine is worth it when it has activity in the audience and it beats the proprietary stuff in “industry supplied modding tools” any day.

Highly probable that very soon, everyone who took the time to learn the GTA engine for modding will be really glad they learned that engine, though, so if you are indeed looking for the best game engine for modding as my stats have suggested lately xD, then I hope my ramblings here have helped you to find it and by all means drop me a comment if you’d like more posts about the GTA engine, tutorials and the like, to be mixed in here.

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